My friend Melissa Gira Grant and I recently attended GayVN Awards, the biggest gay porn industry awards show. Both of our tickets had been gratis through our office jobs, hers as a consultant at the St. James Infirmary (an occupational safety and health clinic for sex workers) and mine as a webmonkey for NakedSword (a hardcore streaming gay porn website). It’s one of those weird, neat little perks of my place of employment, which is otherwise an office job like most any other.
We’ve got health insurance and mysterious 401K paperwork and a sign above the kitchen sink asking people to please wash their damn dishes and cliques and birthday cards passed around and we go on the occasional “team-building” outdoor excursion or out for lunch around the holidays. Except, you know, our raison d’etre is pornography, so we can use dirty words in office emails and it’s perfectly okay to put up pictures of naked hunks if one is so inclined. Best of both worlds.
(Sidenote: my new favorite adjective is “hunky.” It’s often used in movie blurbs, as well as episode synopses for our webcast The Tim & Roma Show, i.e. “Tim and Roma are joined by hunky Jason Adonis…” I have no idea why, but it makes me laugh every single time.)
Sometimes we need to de-porn the office for a sensitive visitor (like one of our “straight” web design clients, or the boss’s nephew), and even though the relaxed corporate culture allows me to decorate my workspace like the gloomy, media-saturated teenager I’ve never stopped being, there’s no nudity on my walls. Three (count ’em, three) Marilyn Manson posters, sure, magazine covers from Bizarre and Fetish and Skin Two as well as one-sheet movie posters for both Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me and Cronenberg’s Crash, both of which are among the most sexually outré films of the nineties, but no porn. Because, really, that would just be tacky.
Melissa’s actual day job is writing for Valleywag, and in addition to Medialoper I write for the Eros Zine (or at least I did, until it folded this week). Our post-modern ironic-yet-sex-positive credentials were solid. Granted, to get in the door all that mattered was that we had our tickets in hand. Like David Cross said, indie hipster cred won’t buy you a house in the country, and at a hundred bucks for regular tickets (and two hundred for my “industry” ticket), we wouldn’t have been there if our bill wasn’t footed.
[Read more…] about Some Links May Be NSFW: The 2008 GayVN Awards
Archives for February 2008
The Daily Loper – February 20, 2008
Goodnight, Moon Edition
Todays links of interest:
- Lindsay Lohan As Marilyn Monroe: Five Outtakes
This prompts the existential question: if we get them a couple of days later, do they really count as outtakes? Is anybody looking at the photos online — far far far more than will ever buy the mag — going to make the distinction between the official shoot and the outtakes? Meanwhile, we still don’t have any outtakes from either "Annie Hall" or "Exile on Main St." - How the co-creator of My So-Called Life launched the Web series quarterlife
"My So-Called Life" is a TV show for the ages, but when when I was at the age of the people in "quarterlife," I thought that "thirtysomething" was whiny and preachy, and now that I’m somewhat past thirtysomething, I think the same about "quarterlife." And, also, he pitches that there be even less consistency in web site design standards than there currently is. Perhaps he should put some of that design energy into making "quarterlife" more, you know, interesting. - FCC upholds ‘NYPD Blue’ ruling
No surprise here: it wasn’t like the FCC was going to come back a month later and say "Golly, we were wrong."
The Daily Loper – February 19, 2008
They Don’t Teach It In Law School Edition
Todays links of interest:
- Criticism puts auction site Bidz.com under microscope
Apparently, DuroSport isn’t the only company with ties to Moldova that might have dodgy business practices. - End of Castro’s Rule Opens Door for Reforms
Apparently, Castro knew that he was finally losing it because he had gone out last year and bought a whole bunch of HD-DVD players. - Best actor, actress races tighten ahead of Oscars
This sounds suspiciously like good, old-fashioned hype.
Goodbye, HD-DVD, I Never Knew You
I’d like to bid farewell to the HD-DVD format, which died a quick death this week. Was it any good?
You see, I was one of the millions of consumers who stayed on the sidelines while HD-DVD fought it out with Blu-Ray for high-definition digital supremacy. Because I knew that this day was inevitable, I stayed away from both formats. So I never actually saw an HD-DVD movie. Not even in a demonstration.
After all, I’d already lived through this movie once before: only it was called Beta vs. VHS. I watched while a lot of smart people got burnt by picking the wrong format, so I figured that I didn’t need to see the remake.
The Daily Loper – February 18, 2008
I Believe He Misremembers Edition
Todays links of interest:
- Free business book is Web sensation
Over a million downloads, yet Suze Orman’s book is ranked number 6 on Amazon. The author is giving her book away because she believes the message is important…and, you know what?, there’s more than one important message happening here. - Musicians sue Universal Music for lost royalties
Universal, naturally, issues a strong, yet cliched denial: ""We believe that these claims are baseless, and we are confident that we will prevail in court," the company said." That’s what she said. - Music videos rely on ingenuity and interactivity
Sort of.
Sorting Out the Future of Publishing at TOC
I’ve been told that you can’t get book publishers to an industry event at the Javits Center if it rains (an observation that I suspect might be a lot more amusing if you’re in the publishing industry and from New York). Regardless, the weather in New York City last week was atrocious (seven degrees and snow), yet O’Reilly Media’s TOC conference was sold out — packed to the rafters with publishing industry insiders. That’s an obvious sign that TOC is not your typical publishing industry event.
Book publishing may not be the world’s oldest profession, but it is the world’s oldest form of mass media. As a result, publishers tend to be a little set in their ways. That’s a nice way of saying that publishers have a lot of catching up to do. And that’s exactly the problem that TOC was designed to solve. This year’s conference dealt with a range of issues challenging traditional publishers, from backlist digitization to XML.
But TOC is about more than just technology. It’s also about the new mindset that publishers need to survive in a world where the traditional media landscape is being transformed by digital convergence and rapidly evolving consumer expectations. These days new technology isn’t enough. Publishers need a whole new way of thinking.
[Read more…] about Sorting Out the Future of Publishing at TOC
The Daily Loper – February 15, 2008
Get A Real Thought Edition
Todays links of interest:
- Slowdown For Best Buy
We’d like to apologize to Best Buy, as we feel somewhat responsible for this. - OH MY GOD — TV Land gave in?!
Jesus Fucking Christ. Does the American Family Association have nothing better to do than this? - Playwright Sounds Off on Jane Fonda’s ‘C-Word’ Slip
I’ve never watched more than 3 minutes of the "Today" show in my entire life, but apparently Jane Fonda has confirmed what people long suspected: that she is a total and utter Communist. Right? That’s the "C-word" that has everybody up in arms? Right?
For Mike Huckabee, Is It More Than A Feeling No More?
All of the pundits are pretty much saying that it looks like curtains for the Presidential Campaign of Mike Huckabee, the bass-playing, Bible-quoting Stephen Colbert-homeboy who is wayyyy behind John McCain in the delegate count.
So it pretty much seems to be a weird time to get insult added to injury, but that insult is coming in the form of Tom Scholz, an Obama supporter (like me!) who wrote the classic Boston song that Huckabee has been using on his campaign trail: “More Than A Feeling.” Scholz is pissed, and he wants it to stop.
To me, this is like that time Elvis sent the widely quoted “open email” to Bill Clinton after Clinton played “Heartbreak Hotel” on Arsenio Hall which ended with “didn’t you see me shaking hands with Nixon, stop playing my song.”
This, of course, is the place for the obligatory “Tom Scholz is still alive?” joke, but instead I’m going to do something perhaps even funnier: defend Mike Huckabee.
[Read more…] about For Mike Huckabee, Is It More Than A Feeling No More?
The Daily Loper – February 14, 2008
Tomorrow’s Makin’ Valentines Edition
Todays links of interest:
- 5 for the Day: Declarations of Love
For Valentine’s Day. - L.A. Times names new editor in ‘battle for future’
Oh look, the L.A. Times named this week’s new editor! - Star Trek Movie Release Date Pushed to May 2009
Read all about it on Star Trek.com! Oh wait, no you can’t, because the geniuses at CBS fired everyone associated with that site. As a matter of fact, Star Trek.com still has the release date as 12-25-2008, apparently because they didn’t bother to keep anyone who knows Photoshop.
The Daily Loper – February 13, 2008
Look Who’s Motherfucking Talking A Second Goddamned Time, It’s a Fucking Baby, How About That? Edition
Todays links of interest:
- Save the Internet: Take Action!
Outraged by what companies like Comcast and AT&T are doing towards restricting Net Neutrality? Take some action! - Comcast to FCC: We block only ‘excessive’ traffic
But we totally define what "excessive" is. Because we don’t believe in Net Neutrality. This, right here, is what the FCC should be dealing with, not some chick’s boobs. - Clemens hearing a circus of conflicting statements, indignant questioning
Jeez, who woulda guessed it would turn out like this? A pox on all of them. Congress for grandstanding; McNamee for being a dealer and/or lying about it and Clemens for, well, just being Clemens. Oh, and don’t think that Congress was grandstanding? "The hearing seemed to split the committee along party lines, with the Democrats reserving their most pointed queries for Clemens, and the Republicans giving McNamee a rougher time."